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You try to meet the lowest common denominator without sacrificing the aethetic quality and content of your site.

You can't please everyone and no matter how hard you try you can't comply with all browsers out there (unless you want a text only page), just remember that content should still be available when everything else fails.

designers worst nightmare everywhere
i pretty much follow your process but i don't lean towards perfection.
as cyberprince said...just get it to its closest best look...it doesn't have to be exactly the same throughout diff. browsers.

A while back I had a little app that generated it's own idea of what it thought wouldn't work in each browser. IT was better than nothing.

The problem is, generally it's not just a case of having rules that "tag 'x' doesn't render on Netscape Version X".

It's more a case of tag 'x' doesn't render on this occasion because it's placed inside a left aligned <TD> with <blockquotes> and CSS margins applied to it.

In other words, the problems are often generated by 'one-off' conflicts, specific to the code you just wrote. It's hard to 'rule-ize' it for easy future reference. In fact, there are certain legitimate combinations of CSS tags that can bring down NS4.7 in less than a second. Change the order, and their fine.

I actually find myself more and more using server based browser detection (in my case PHP) to construct browser-specific pages, rather than spending frustrating hours trying to get a single piece of code to dance perfectly on all platforms.

It's still the same page. It just gets a slight 'refit' on it's way out the door

In the end this is actually a much quicker developmental process and gets around the inefficiency of sending the user the code for all platforms/versions and having JavaScript piece together the right bits in the browser.

AlexW,
could you please provide me with an example of what you are talking about.....once you detect a particular browser, how exactly are you using php to construct browser specific pages...
thanks....

I think it depends on how compatible you want to be. Some people want a site to look exactly the same in every browser, some don't care what it looks like as long as it's basically functional, and others go for more of a happy medium. That's the kind of stance I take - it doesn't matter to me if it doesn't look exactly the same in IE and NS, as long as it looks fairly good in both and is functional.

My strategy is really based on experience -as I said in another thread, once you've worked with this enough you come to know before hand what will and will not work. Stick with a tabled layout, basic CSS for fonts etc., keep a spacer.gif handy....don't bother with the dHTML...

If you look at the source in IE5, NS6 & NS4 you'll see that they differ, even though they render similarly.

Generally I put the 'detect & select code' in place as I discover the problems, but I let it splice in the same code regardless of the browers for the time being. Then, as the job is wrapping up, I work through those issues one at at time, the reason being that if you're working to strict launch deadlines, you may be able to solve the problems for the lesser represented browsers after the official launch (if you have to).